Alyssa Petersel, LMSW is the Founder and CEO of MyWellbeing, where she and her team match people with the *right* therapist for them, while helping therapists build and manage their business. Alyssa, also a writer and therapist, released her award-winning debut narrative nonfiction anthology, Somehow I Am Different, in 2016. Alyssa graduated from Northwestern University in 2013, New York University in 2017 with her Master's in Social Work, and The Writer's Institute in May 2017. Named one of Crain's Notable Women in Healthcare 2019, Alyssa and her team have helped nearly 20,000 people find the right therapist for them and have been featured in prominent publications like Forbes, Allure, HuffPost, Cosmopolitan, bloom, and more.
Can you tell our readers about your background?
It’s so good to “be here,” and to e-meet all of you! I started my career as a community organizer, working for a 3-person team (myself included) called Strengthening Chicago’s Youth (SCY), under the broader umbrella of Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago. From there, I used Kickstarter to crowdfund one-year’s-worth of runway to live for one year in Budapest, Hungary, and research, write and publish my first book, Somehow I Am Different. While in the final stages of editing and publishing, I returned to Chicago to bring my book baby to market and to work with a number of culinary teams in Wicker Park as a waitress and barista. I returned to New York, where I grew up, to earn my Master’s in Social Work from NYU in 2015 and began working as a therapist in 2017. That same year, I started MyWellbeing to support people in connecting with the *right* therapist for them, largely inspired my own experience both having a difficult time finding my own therapist, and having a difficult time connecting with clients who were just the right fit for my personality, style, and clinical expertise.
What inspired you to start your business?
When I began training to become a therapist myself, I finally took my own therapist search more seriously. I identify as a “recovering perfectionist,” someone who has held myself to a very high standard for a very long time, and as a result, someone who has become closely familiar with anxiety and periodic blips of depression along the way. I have had the privilege of being able to postpone my therapist search for most of my life, as the anxiety I was suffering from was deemed not only socially acceptable but quite normal and celebrated among my social groups and networks.
When I committed to becoming a therapist, I also committed to better understanding the client’s experience on the other side of the couch and began my search. I learned the hard way quite how many hoops you have to jump through, not only to find the RIGHT therapist fit but to connect with ANY therapist at all. I combed through directory after directory, reached out to therapist after therapist, only to receive no answer or messages that the therapist was full or 3x more expensive than I expected. After beginning to work as a therapist, and experiencing on the other side that clients would come to my office based on my headshot and need a type or level of care that was not well aligned with my expertise, I had the light bulb moment that both sides, in a position to deeply benefit from meeting each other, did not have the appropriate tools at their fingertips.
As someone who has benefited from the ease of technology in other verticals, like dating apps, media recommendations, and takeout order recommendations, I knew that if technology could streamline relatively low-stress problem sets, it certainly could and should be utilized to facilitate high impact social change and emotional wellbeing.
Where is your business based?
We are proudly based in New York and have an international team. Now a team of 4 full-time, we have teammates based in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Chicago, and a number of part-time teammates in Poland, Seattle, and everywhere in between.
How did you start your business? What were the first steps you took?
Three years ago, I started MyWellbeing through a 10-week business accelerator program at NYU called The Summer Launchpad Program (SLP). This program provided $10,000 in non-dilutive funding, which means that NYU did not purchase any shares in our company, they issued us a grant as starter capital to kick things off. Following this initiation, we dove deep into “customer discovery,” which looked a lot like talking to anyone and everyone who would share with me about their therapist- or client-search experience. What did they like most? What did they like least? What problems would they wash away if they could solve them with the wave of a magic wand? This insight, directly from the source, laid the foundation for our first product, and both therapy-seekers and mental health providers continue to be at the core of our perspective and priorities.
What has been the most effective way of raising awareness for your business?
This may sound counterintuitive, but values, patience, and diligence have been the most effective way to raise awareness about our business. In our earliest days, our business grew via exclusive word of mouth. We prioritized providing an exceptional experience to those who we worked with, and they appreciated that experience so much, they told others. As we grew, we learned how to make the most of paid advertising, primarily via Google keywords. We earned press and media coverage that continued to feed our organic growth. Today, most learn of MyWellbeing through organic channels like Instagram (you can gain free mental health tips and perspectives via our account @findmywellbeing) and content marketing (check out the Content Corner on our website to learn more about what therapy really is and how it can benefit you).
What have been your biggest challenges and how did you overcome them?
One of our biggest challenges has been fundraising. To date, we have raised a little bit over $1 million dollars. Each fundraising period spread me just a little bit too thin, which led to episodes of burnout, lack of focus, and the emotional burden of not showing up the way I wanted to for our team and our community of therapy-seekers and providers.
I overcame this challenge (and continue to overcome it) with diligence, creative problem solving, committing to a revenue-generating model for our business that kept us alive when external funding wouldn’t, and unapologetically surrounding myself with support systems to lift me up and remind me to reinforce work boundaries when I needed it most. I cannot overstate the importance of a team you trust. My team inspiringly operated the on-the-ground work of our business while I was in back-to-back fundraising meetings for 12 hours a day. Growing and sustaining MyWellbeing would not have been possible in those periods without any of the above.
How do you stay focused?
Focus is so important, and honestly, I need this reminder regularly. I believe I’m not alone in this personality trait as an entrepreneur: I am deeply passionate about our [mental health] space and I am very excitable. When I think of a new idea, new direction, or new initiative that I believe holds a lot of potentials, I am vulnerable to brainstorming all the ways in which that would better our business and better the lives and experiences of the individual we work with. When and if I share these brainstorms with some of my teammates, the brainstorming out of context can feel disorienting.
It helps me to stay focused when I reference and cross-check against our predetermined core focus areas for any given quarter. When those are proactively outlined, instead of spinning a wheel in an unrelated direction, I jot down my ideas elsewhere in a growing list. I know that I can choose from that list for future goals and priorities, but right now, I and the team will be most efficient and will drive forward with the most velocity if we focus our energy, talent, and headspace on our determined goals.
How do you differentiate your business from the competition?
We at MyWellbeing are proud of our clinical leadership. Both I and my first hire, Kayla, are trained as therapists and believe that our clinical training highly impacts our empathy with both therapy-seekers and mental health providers, equipping us to design and execute a product and community that speaks to both sides and provides unique value. We also prioritize a brand voice that is jargon-free, human, authentic, and approachable. Research proves that we are all impacted by mental health. We all have it -- just like we all have physical health -- and it’s time we treated our mental health with curiosity, compassion, and proactive maintenance and growth.
What has been your most effective marketing strategy to grow your business?
Our most effective marketing strategy has been hiring Mariah Parker, who is our Head of Growth, who is an exceptional talent who wears multiple hats a day. Her core marketing and growth talents are as impressive as her interpersonal skills and values. Mariah is a partner in our growth who I thoroughly trust, which empowers me to utilize my time in other ways, arguably the most important factor in hiring, especially at the early stage of a business.
What's your best piece of advice for aspiring and new entrepreneurs?
Think about what success means to you and map out how you will get there. Start with a long-term vision of what you think the future should look like and break that down into yearly, quarterly, and monthly goals. Then build relationships and onboard talent who you can thoroughly trust as people and as operators. You cannot and will not do everything alone--that headspace, though hard to break out of, is a fast recipe for burnout. You will go further together. The right hire for you may not look or sound like the right hire for someone else. Accept and appreciate advice and guidance, but dig deep internally to hear your gut and intuition and follow those guideposts ruthlessly.
What's your favorite app, blog, and book? Why?
My favorite app (other than MyWellbeing, of course) is Insight Timer. I appreciate that Insight curates guided meditations from diverse, eclectic perspectives. When I am experiencing especially high anxiety, particularly if during a period where I need to make a number of very important decisions, it’s helpful for me to turn on a guided meditation and blindly follow someone else’s directions for a moment.
I don’t know that I would call Resmaa Menakem’s website a blog, but I find Resmaa’s perspective, resources, courses, books, and tools on anti-racism to be immensely powerful.
I also am currently reading Lean In, which is supporting me in better understanding how my being a woman impacts my leadership style, which is further empowering me to decide who I want to be, how I want to lead, and which aspects of my conditioning I want to hold on to and which I want to challenge myself to walk away from.
What's your favorite business tool or resource? Why?
I haven’t thought about this one! Currently, my favorite business tool is Slack. In the age of COVID, Slack’s impressively empowered my team to stay closely connected while we are physically so far away. I believe we’ve built great practices internally to maintain focus on our tasks as much as possible, while also having a consistent thread through which we can keep each other updated, ask questions when needed, practice curiosity and learning when we make mistakes, and celebrate wins that we’ve worked so hard for.
Who is your business role model? Why?
I have so many! One of my business role models currently is Nedal Shami. One of the co-founders of CityMD, Nedal has been a leader in the healthcare space for years. I admire that he prioritizes the health and wellbeing of others in his endeavors. He is an early mentor and advisor for me and MyWellbeing and consistently provides invaluable support, feedback, and perspective. The more I work on MyWellbeing, the busier it seems the days get, and the more I appreciate how generous Nedal has been with his time, energy, and lived experience. Perhaps most importantly, despite increasing demands at work, I’ve observed Nedal balancing his professional and personal lives with a smile on his face in a way that I aspire to.
How do you balance work and life?
I believe my answer to this question will always change, in relation to the various moving pieces that life inevitably tosses in our direction. Currently, I balance work and life by setting as clear as possible goals and expectations for what I hope to achieve at work in any given period of time. I am ambitious in my goal setting and I celebrate when I meet those goals. If I don’t meet them, I practice curiosity around why and I make changes to perform better the next time.
When I do meet those goals, I give myself permission to sign off of screens. I also recognize that many of the goals I am setting for myself are not achievable overnight. I am increasingly more realistic about timelines and more granular about short-term goals that feed long-term goals. This helps me reduce the feeling of not doing enough, or they’re always being more to do when I sign off for the day. Moreover, I constantly remind myself that I perform significantly better as a CEO, social worker, sister, daughter, girlfriend, and friend when the various aspects of my life that I prioritize -- both work AND life -- are well-fed. I need sleep, nutrition, exercise, personal relationships, and professional achievement to be my best self, and why would I set myself up to be anything less than my preferred version of me?
What’s your favorite way to decompress?
My favorite way to decompress is to reduce sensory inputs (in other ways, reducing light, sound, and external stimulation as much as possible), especially when I have the opportunity to sit or lay quietly with a dog. I start meditating by focusing on the dog’s heartbeat against my body (usually my feet or my chest, where the dog is sitting or lying). I sometimes also pet the dog and focus on the sensation of my hand against their fur. This is incredibly soothing for me and helps me feel grounded and connected.
When I have more energy, I also love spending quality time with friends, family, and loved ones, generally away from screens as much as possible.
What do you have planned for the next six months?
We are so thrilled to welcome Michael Shulman, our Senior PM, to our team on August 3, 2020! We are looking forward to the immense impact he will make internally and externally for our team and community.
We are continuing to explore and test new initiatives for even deeper impact with our therapy-seeker and provider communities. If you are a MyWellbeing member or user and have thoughts and ideas, don’t hesitate to reach out! We’re all ears and we’d love to hear from you.
How can our readers connect with you?
You can learn more about MyWellbeing any time or match with the right therapist for you via our MyWellbeing. If you’d like free mental health tips and perspective, check out our Content Corner or follow us on Instagram at @findmywellbeinng. If you would like to join the MyWellbeing community as a mental health provider, learn more and get started here. We look forward to connecting with you!
